Tomato Cheese Custard

[igenlode]

Another very successful recipe from the "120 ways of using Bread" vintage leaflet: 'Tomato Cheese Custard', which doesn't sound frightfully appealing but came out very tasty and sustaining, and quite attractive too :-)

It's effectively a sort of simplified soufflé which uses fresh breadcrumbs as thickening; I forgot to "well butter" my dish before putting in the tomatoes and didn't bother to skin them, but it still came out successfully. By halving all the quantitities I just about had enough bread left from my crumbled sourdough roll to create some very small fingers of hot buttered toast as accompaniment; one roll creates about a mugful of breadcrumbs, depending on size, which is more than one would think.

Tomato Cheese Custard

• 2 eggs
• 1 pint of milk
• 1 cupful breadcrumbs
• 3 heaped dessertspoonfuls of grated cheese
• Salt and pepper
• Tomatoes (I used a couple of salad tomatoes for a single helping)

Well butter a deep baking dish and put in a good layer of sliced and skinned tomatoes. Beat up the eggs in the milk. Stir in the breadcrumbs, grated cheese and salt and pepper to taste. Bake in a moderate oven until the custard is set. (It took an hour for mine -- the mixture gets much more liquid once the tomatoes start to break down.) Serve very hot with a dish of hot buttered toast cut into fingers on which a little red pepper has been sprinkled.

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

What kind of cheese did you use?

[igenlode]

Ordinary Cheddar, which is what any recipe of the era would have assumed (and is still the default ingredient any time 'cheese' is mentioned without qualification).

But I don't suppose it makes much difference what you use, provided it melts; I imagine you could put in anything that might be found in a soufflé: "Cheese possibilities include Gruyère, Emmenthal, Comté, chèvre, brie, cheddar, manchego, and blue".

[watervole]

I think my mother used to cook something very like that. And it was very tasty.

[igenlode]

Makes sense -- none of those recipes would have been devised from scratch for the benefit of the readers of the magazine, but would just have been a collection of whatever was well-known at the time.

In fact even nowadays I think very few published recipes are actually the author's own invention; notoriously you can't copyright a recipe, although you can technically speaking copyright the deathless prose in which the technique is described -- hence perhaps the effusions of the Jamie Oliver school of cookery ("Roll the meat in flour, whack it in and bung in the onion. Slosh the meat and gravy out the pan..." [sic])

[watervole]

Could be, but my mother was an inveterate collector of newspaper and magazine recipes. She almost never did anything original.

[igenlode]

That's what I meant, really -- the recipe would have been one that was doing the general rounds of the magazines at the time, rather than anything special.

In fact I came across a distinctly similar dish in one of my later cookery books shortly afterwards, though I can't find it again (the recipe indexes tend to be the weak point); it involved semolina instead of bread, but the basic ingredients of tomatoes, cheese, egg custard and thickening were still present.